Nemesis

by James Swallow

  Still; feeding now, and a full meal with it. Bones ground between razor teeth, organs still hot and wet bitten into like ripe fruits, and blood by the bucket for the drinking. Thirst slaked, for a while. Yes. It would do.

  Deep in the canyons of his mind, Spear could hear the echo of the camouflage’s ghost-mind as it wept and screamed, forced to watch these deeds from the cage where it was held. It could not understand that it was only noise now, no longer a being with life and power to influence the outside world. For as long as Spear remained in control, it would always be so.

  Yosef Sabrat was only the last in a long line of coatings painted over Spear’s malleable aspect, like a dye poured on silk. The killer’s flesh, infused with the living skin of a warp-predator, was more daemon than man and it obeyed no laws of the conventional universe. It was a shape with no shape, but not like those human fools who used chemical philtres to manipulate their skin and bone and think themselves clever. What Spear was went beyond the nature of disguise, beyond transformation. There was a word for it that the ancient banned theologies used to talk of their deities taking on human form; they called it assumption.

  When he was sated, he gathered what remained of Hyssos and cautiously filled a barrel with the leavings. The operative’s clothing and gear he had stripped with care, placing it to one side for later use. The corpse-meat would be hurled from the roof of the winestock, where it would fall to the floor of the narrow crags far below, and into the rapids that would wash the leftovers out to sea; but first he had the final steps to perform.

  From one of the giant tanks given over to the maturation of the wines, Spear dragged out a fleshy egg and used his teeth to open it. Foul gases discharged from within and a naked man dropped out on to the wooden flooring. The sac had grown from a seed Spear planted in the lung of a homeless drunkard shortly after arriving on Iesta Veracrux. Conjured by the sorcery of his masters, the seed consumed the vagrant to make the egg, giving birth to a stasis caul where Spear had been able to store Yosef Sabraf’s body for the past two months.

  As the sac dissolved into vapour, he dressed Sabrat in the clothes he had worn while the aspect had been at the fore. The caul had done its work. The dead reeve looked as if he had been freshly killed; no human means of detection would say otherwise. The stab wound through the man’s heart began to bleed again, and Spear artfully arranged the body, finding the harvesting knife in a flesh pocket and applying it to the wound.

  He paused to ensure that the puncture on the roof of Sabrat’s mouth was not visible. The iron-hard proboscis that penetrated there had licked at the matter of the lawman’s brain and siphoned off the chains of chemicals that were his memories, his persona. Then, Spear’s daemonskin had patterned itself on those markers, shifting and becoming. The change was so strong, so deep, that when Spear surrendered control to it, the camouflage aspect was not merely a mask that the murderer wore; it was a living, breathing identity. A persona so perfect that it believed itself to be real, resilient enough that even a cursory psionic scan would not see the lie of it.

  Still, it had made sense to murder the psyker woman as soon as possible, if not only to protect the truth but also to force the hand of the investigators. Now the next phase was complete, and the Yosef Sabrat identity had played its role flawlessly. Soon Spear would begin the purgation of the disguise, and finally be rid of the man’s irritatingly moral thought processes, his disgustingly soft compassion, the sickening attachment to his colleagues, brood-child and bed partner. From this point on, Spear would only wear a face, and never again give himself over to another man’s self. He was almost giddy with anticipation. Just a few more steps, and he would be within striking distance of his target.

  The murderer knelt next to Hyssos’ head, severed at the neck by a slicing cut, and gathered it up. With a guttural choke, Spear spat the proboscis from the soft palate of his mouth and into the skull through its right eye. Seeking, penetrating, it dug deep and found the regions of the dead man’s brain where his self was growing cold.

  Spear drank him in.

  KOYNE PUT AWAY the monocular and hid it inside a pocket of the officer’s tunic the infocyte had recovered from one of the airfield’s dead. It fit snugly, but the adjustment of the fluid-filled morphing bladders layered underneath the Callidus’ skin allowed the assassin to alter body mass and dimension to accommodate it a little better.

  “How do you propose we get inside?” said Iota. The Culexus was almost invisible in the shadows by the broken window, with only the steel-grey curve of her grinning helmet visible in the moonlight. Her voice had a peculiar, metallic timbre to it when she spoke from inside the psyker-hood, as if it were coming to Koyne’s ears from a very great distance.

  “Through the front door.” The Callidus watched the men walking back and forth in front of the communicatory, considering the cautious motions in their steps, analysing the cues of their body language not just for infiltration’s sake, but to parse their states of mind. Data-slates, recovered from what remained of the corpses of the turncoat patrol murdered by the Garantine, had provided the Execution Force with a lead on this facility. It was the nearest thing to a garrison for kilometres around, and at this stage Kell wasn’t ready to send the group out from the relative safety of the Ultio and down the long highway to the capital city, several kilometres to the south. The metropolis itself, the largest of all on Dagonet, could be seen clearly against the darkening sky. Some of the taller towers were still smoking, some had half-collapsed and fallen like drunkards suspended on each other’s shoulders; but no snakes of tracer lashed at the skies, there were no mushroom clouds or flights of assault craft buzzing overhead. It seemed calm, or at least as calm as a city on a world at war with itself had any right to be.

  When Koyne had asked the Vindicare what he had learned on his scouting mission, the Eversor had just grinned and the sniper replied with a terse dismissal. “It’s complicated,” he said.

  Koyne did not doubt that. The Callidus had learned through many hundreds of field operations, a lot of them in active zones of conflict, that what generals in their places of comfort and control called “ground truth” was often anything but true. For the soldier as much as the assassin, the only equation of truth that always worked was the simple vector between a weapon and a target. But now they were here, Koyne and the pariah girl Iota, the Culexus’ skin-crawling null ability brought along to protect the shade from any possible psionic interception.

  “Tariel was correct in his evaluation,” said Iota, as a rotorplane chattered past overhead. “There is an astropath inside that building.”

  “Is it aware of you?”

  She shook her head, the distended skull-helm moving back and forth. “No. I think it may be under the influence of chemical restraints.”

  “Good.” Koyne stood up. “We don’t want the alarm to be raised before we are done here.” Concentrating on a thought-shape and impressing that on flesh, the Callidus altered the dimension of its vocal chords, mimicking the tonality of an officer caught on one of the intercepted vox broadcasts. “We will proceed.”

  THE SHAPESHIFTER WAS as good as its word.

  Keeping to the shadows and the low rooftops along the star-port’s blockhouses, Iota followed the Callidus and watched Koyne become a simulacrum of a turncoat PDF commander, advancing through the outer guard post of the communicatory without raising even a moment of concern. At one point, Iota lost sight of the Callidus, and when a man in Dagoneti colours approached her hiding place, she made ready the combi-needler about the wrist of her killing hand in order to silently end him.

  “Iota,” called an entirely different voice. “Show yourself.”

  She stepped into the light. “I like your tricks,” said Iota.

  Koyne smiled with someone else’s face and opened a door. “This way. I relieved the guards at the elevator in here so we won’t have much time. They’re holding the astropath on one of the sublevels.”

  “Why did you change it?” Iota asked as
they moved through the ill-lit corridors. “The face?”

  “I bore easily,” replied Koyne, halting at a lift shaft. “Here we are.”

  As the Callidus reached for the switch, the doors opened, flooding the corridor with light; inside the elevator two troopers saw the dark shape of the Culexus and went for their guns.

  SPEAR SWALLOWED HYSSOS’ one undamaged eye before depositing the dead man’s reamed head among the rest of him; and then with a swift spin of his body, he pitched the remains into the canyon and watched them fall away.

  Returning to the tank room, he skirted the beauty of the blood-art he had made from Erno Sigg’s corpse. He had used poor Erno as his stalking horse, tormenting him, pushing him to the edge of sanity before destroying him. The man had served his purpose perfectly. Spear moved on, checking once more that the body of Yosef Sabrat had been arranged just so. The evidence he had fabricated over the past few weeks was also scattered around, arranged so that when it was discovered, it would lead the investigators of the Sentine towards one undeniable conclusion – the killer of Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue, Perrig and Sigg and the rest of them was none other than their fellow lawman.

  He made a mock-solemn expression with the new face he wore, trying the look on for size; but he had no mirror to see how it seemed on his new guise. Spear pawed at a face that now resembled that of the Eurotas operative. It felt odd and incomplete. The churn of new memories and personality sucked in from Hyssos was curdling where it mixed with those of Sabrat, making him thought-sick. It seemed it would be necessary to purge the stolid reeve’s self sooner rather than later.

  With a deep sigh, Spear dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. He drew on the disciplines that had been beaten into him by his master and focussed his will, seeing it like a line of poison fire laced with ink-black ice.

  Reaching into the deeps of his thoughts, Spear found the cage and tore it open, clawing inside to gather up the mind-scraps that were all that remained of Yosef Sabrat. He grinned as fear resonated up from the shuddering persona as some understanding of its final end became clear. Then he began the purge, ripping and tearing, destroying everything that had been the man, vomiting up every nauseating, cloying skein of emotion, little by little sluicing Sabrat’s cloying self away.

  Spear gave this deed such focus that it was only when he heard the voice he realised he was no longer alone.

  KOYNE’S HAND FLICKED up and the toxin-filled stiletto hidden in a wrist sheath flew out in a shallow arc, piercing the stomach of the man on the left. The liquid inside was a consumptive agent that feasted on organic matter, even down to natural fibres and cured leather. He fell to the floor and began to dissolve.

  The other man was briefly wreathed in white light that glowed down the hallway as Iota pressed a hand into his chest and shoved him back into the elevator. Koyne watched with detachment as the Culexus’ dark power enveloped the man and destroyed him. His silent scream resonated and he became a mass of material like burned paper. In moments, a curl of damp smoke was all that marked the man’s passing; the other hapless soldier was now a puddle of fluids leaking away through the gridded decking of the elevator floor.

  Content that the toxin had run its course and consumed itself into the bargain, the Callidus kicked at the collection of inert tooth fillings, metal buttons and plastic buckles that had gathered and brushed them away with the passage of a boot. Koyne took a moment to break the biolume bubble illuminating the interior of the elevator, and then pressed the control to send it downwards.

  They travelled in dark and silence for a few moments, and for Koyne the Culexus seemed to melt away and disappear, even though she was standing at her shoulder.

  “His name was Mortan Gautami,” Iota said suddenly. “He never told anyone of it, but his mother had been able to see the future in dreams. He had a measure of postcognitive ability, but he indulged in narcotics, preventing him from accessing his potential.” The skull head turned slightly. “I used that untapped energy to destroy him.”

  “I’ll bet you know the names of everyone you’ve terminated,” said Koyne, with a flicker of cruelty.

  “Don’t you?” said the Culexus.

  The Callidus didn’t bother to grace that with an answer. The elevator arrived at the sublevel, and the guards standing outside fell to quick killing blows.

  There was a spherical containment chamber in the middle of a room made of ferrocrete, festoons of cables issuing from every point on its surface. A heavy iron iris hatch lay facing them like a closed eye, a short gantry reaching it from the sublevel proper. Koyne stepped up and worked the lever to open it; there was a thin, high-pitched sound coming from inside, and at first the Callidus thought it was a pressure leak; then the iron leaves retracted and it became clear it was reedy, shrill screaming.

  Koyne peered into the depths and saw the corpse-grey astropath. It was pressed up against the back of the sphere’s inner wall, glaring sightlessly towards Iota. “Hole-mind,” it babbled, between howls. “Black-shroud. Poison-thought.”

  The Callidus rapped a stolen pistol against the threshold of the hatch. “Hey!” Koyne snarled in the officer’s voice. “Stop whining. I’ll make this simple. Give up the information I need, or I’ll lock her in there with you.”

  The astropath made the sign of the aquila, as if it were some kind of ancient rite of warding that would fend off evil. The shrieking died away, and crack-throated, the psychic spoke. “Just keep it at a distance.”

  Iota took her cue and wandered away, moving back towards the elevator shaft but still within earshot. “Better?”

  That earned Koyne a weak nod. “I will tell you what you want to know.”

  The assassin learned quickly that the astropath was one of only a handful of its kind still alive in the Dagonet system. In the headlong melee of revolution, in the process of isolating itself from the galaxy and the Imperium, the planet had begun to rid itself of all lines of connection back to Terra – but some of the newly empowered nobles had thought otherwise and made sure that at least a few telepaths capable of interstellar sending were kept alive. This was one of them, cut off from all means of speaking to its kindred, locked up and isolated. It was starved of communication, and once it began to talk in its papery monotone, the astropath seemed unable to stop.

  The psychic spoke of the state of the civil war. As the brief given by Captain-General Valdor had said, Dagonet was a keystone world in the politico-economic structure of the Taebian Sector, and if it fell fully under the shadow of the Warmaster, then it would mark the beginning of a domino effect, as planet after planet along the same trade axis followed suit. Every loyalist foothold in this sector of space would be in jeopardy. In the first moments of the insurrection, desperate signals had been sent to the Adeptus Astartes and the Imperial Navy; but these had gone unanswered.

  Koyne took this in and said nothing. Both the ships of the admiralty and the Legions of the Emperor’s loyalist Astartes had battles of their own to fight, far from the Taebian Stars. They would not intervene. For all the fire and destruction the collapse of Dagonet and its sister worlds might cause, there were larger conflicts being addressed at this very moment; no crusade of heroes was coming to ride to the rescue. Then the astropath began to lay out the lines of the civil war as it had spread up until this point, and the Callidus thought back to something said aboard the Ultio on their way to Dagonet.

  The civil war was a rout, and it was those who stood in the Emperor’s name who were dying. Across the planet, the forces that carried Horus’ banner were only days away from breaking the back of any resistance.

  Dagonet was already lost.

  REEVE DAIG SEGAN. Through Sabrat’s memories, Spear recalled that the man was as dogged as he was dour, and for all his apparently slow aspect, he was troublingly perceptive.

  “Yosef?” said the reeve, moving through the gloom with a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. “What is that stench? Yosef, Hyssos… Are you in here?”

  Segan
had followed them to Whyteleaf, despite the orders Sabrat had given, the persona unaware of Spear’s subtle guidance bubbling beneath the surface.

  In his thoughts, the murderer heard the dim resonance of Sabrat’s essence crying out to be heard. Impossibly, the persona was trying to defy him. It was fighting its own erasure.

  Spear’s body, cloaked in Hyssos’ proxy flesh, trembled. The purge was a complicated, delicate task that required all of his concentration. He could not afford to deal with any interruption, not now, not when he was at so critical a juncture…

  “Hello?” Segan was coming closer. At any moment, he would come across Spear’s carefully constructed crime scene. But it was too soon. Too soon!

  Very clearly, Spear heard Sabrat laughing at him. With sudden annoyance, he punched himself in the head and the pain of the blow made the ghost of the voice fall silent. His cheek and the orbit of his right eye sagged as they tried to retain the shape of Hyssos’ imprint.

  Spear got up and went to meet Segan as he approached. The other reeve’s torch caught him and he heard the man gasp in shock.

  “Hyssos? Where’s Yosef?” Segan peered at him. “What’s wrong with your face?”

  “Nothing,” said the operative’s voice. “Everything is fine.”

  The reeve seemed doubtful. “Can you smell that? Like blood and shit and all kinds of—” Segan’s torchlight illuminated part of the operative’s coat, still wet with vitae. “Are you hurt?”

  Spear was close to him now. “I had a job for you,” he said. “A part to play. Why did you come here when I told you to stay in the city?”

  “Yosef told me to stay, not you,” Segan retorted, becoming wary. “I don’t follow your orders, even if everyone else jumps each time your damn baron coughs.”

  “But you should have stayed,” Spear insisted. “Now I’ll have to rewrite the scenario.”

  “What are you on about?” said the reeve.

  “Come and see.” Spear lashed out and grabbed him by the collar. Caught off-guard, Segan stumbled and that was all the murderer needed to destroy his balance and throw him down the length of the room.